The Big Interview - Henry Dimbleby

Henry Dimbleby

Life in a professional kitchen set Henry Dimbleby on a path to politics. Emma Scott meets the dedicated foodie poised to take on the system.

According to E. M. Forster ‘one person with passion is better than forty people merely interested’. If this is true, the new National Food Strategy is off to a very promising start, because at its helm is culinary crusader Henry Dimbleby.

I’ll confess to feeling slightly daunted at the prospect of interviewing this high-profile figurehead.

After all, he was part of the team which created a restaurant chain with a turnover of more than £65.2m, co-authored the School Food Plan and has been tasked by the government to head up its new National Food Strategy.

But professional success aside, it quickly becomes clear this is a man with an infectious passion not only for food but the entire food system.

By the end of our conversation I am both inspired by his enthusiasm and suddenly rather hungry.

It’s this quality, combined with an impressive CV, that makes Henry Dimbleby uniquely qualified for his latest role.

One in eight people in this country make their living from the food system and for 25 years Henry has been one of them. He started his career as a commis chef with Michelin-starred Bruno Loubet but soon found he was too messy for a professional kitchen.

His unlikely next move was to The Daily Telegraph as a gossip columnist and from there he side-stepped to a management consultancy firm where he met John Vincent, his Leon co-founder.

Henry says: “The purpose of Leon was to help people eat food that was delicious, that they enjoyed and that made them feel good. But through the process of starting the business and developing an understanding of the supply chain I became more interested in some of the broader issues around sustainability.”

This soon led to the creation of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, a not-for-profit designed to help foodservice businesses work towards sustainability, as well as help customers make more sustainable choices.

When his work and ethos came to the attention of government, Henry and his business partner John were approached to think about how to improve food in schools.

The result was the School Food Plan.

Published by the Department for Education, in 2013, the School Food Plan sets out actions to transform what children eat in schools and positively impact how they learn about food.

Subsequently, Henry set up the charity Chefs in Schools, which re-trains commercial chefs to work full-time in school kitchens.

It’s fair to say Henry’s professional life revolves almost entirely around the subject he talks so knowledgeably about. His passion for food is undeniable.

This enthusiasm is now being channelled into a task that has the potential to shape what and how we eat for generations to come: heading up an independent review to help the government create its first National Food Strategy in 75 years.

Heralded as a way to ensure our food system delivers safe, healthy and affordable food – while being robust, resilient, sustainable and a thriving contributor to our urban and rural economies – the sheer ambition and scale of the strategy means Henry’s certainly got his work cut out.

Did he know what he was taking on when Defra’s Secretary of State gave him the job back in June? How does he feel now the reality’s becoming apparent? Is he still relishing the chance to get his teeth sunk in?

“It’s an unbelievably daunting challenge because it addresses one of the biggest issues facing western civilisation. But the exciting thing is there’s an understanding these are really important issues and the creation of this programme is an opportunity to try to help this country tackle them," he says.

But the country hasn’t had a National Food Strategy since WWII, so is it an indication we’re once again at crisis point?

In Winston Churchill’s memoir, 'The Second World War, Volume 2', the former prime minister admitted: ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.’

This was because food supplies from the rest of the world were essential to the war effort, so one of Germany’s key strategies was to use submarine warfare in an attempt to starve Britain into submission.

The fact is, we’re facing huge challenges in terms of health, environment and sustainability but they’re a far cry from the scarce food supplies and utter devastation of infrastructure that led to rationing.

Henry explains: “Coming out of the war we were terrified of running out of food, so through the 50s, 60s and 70s that was the focus of our national food policy: could we feed ourselves from our own resources? Did we have food security?

“Then in the 80s, because of those policies and the policies across the European Union, we found we had too much food. We had

butter mountains and wine lakes, so we kind of gave up trying at that point. We ceased to invest in research and innovation. We thought we had solved the food problem.”

However, far from solving ‘the food problem’ we’ve inadvertently ended up with a new set of challenges: “It’s now become clear that while the free market has created an unbelievable range and abundance of food at prices that would be unimaginable to previous generations, it’s causing some real problems, not only with our health but the environment as well.

“It also raises questions about whether we can think about food security in the same way we have in the past. And that’s why we now need to deal with food right the way across government by thinking about education, business, trade, health, farming and the environment all at the same time.”

Henry hopes this holistic approach can improve the system so it can continue to deliver the amount of healthy and affordable food the population needs, while eliminating the negative impacts.

The new National Food Strategy was launched in August 2019 with a call for evidence from anyone with a good idea: producers, processors, retailers, consumers, academics, policy specialists, inventors, farm labourers, factory workers, health care practitioners, charity workers or even just interested citizens. All of us were urged to suggest how our food system might be able to work better by detailing our own experiences, recommendations and vision both as business professionals and members of the public.

Hundreds of responses were submitted and now it’s Henry’s job to collate the myriad ideas and produce an independent review that will go on to inform the government.

“The problems have been diagnosed to death,” he reasons. “We know what the problems are so what we need to do now is understand what’s actually working and that might be small things from your home, it might be things from the business you’re in, it might be in your community, it might be things you’ve seen abroad.

“We wanted to hear about what people think are the things we can learn from elsewhere, to help us all changethe food system in this country.”

At the time of writing it was still unclear if, when or how the UK would leave the EU.

To say there has been political uncertainty would be something of an understatement but Henry has some words of reassurance: "Nothing is certain in politics but what I do know is this is something that’s being taken seriously. We have support from Labour, from the Lib Dems, from the Tories. It’s something that’s important to society, so I can’t see any future government shutting down all the good that’s going on.”

“So I’m ploughing on with the work and assuming that when the cloud we’re currently under lifts, there will be a need to take a really positive step forward to try to help our food system.”

While the impact of Brexit is likely to play a part in Henry’s review (“trade policy and how we think about our trading links is very much part of the brief”), the new food strategy will cover everything from waste management to food provisions in hospitals.

Henry says: “The scope is intentionally ambitious and broad because the understanding is that this is a system that you need to deal with in a holistic way.

“That said, it’s not my intention to replace or repeat the initiatives that are already working well. For example, Ben Elliot is doing great work on food waste but there might be other areas where I think nothing is being done, so that will be a judgement call as we go through the process.”

With such broad horizons to contend with, to what extent is frozen on the radar?

After all, the industry’s ideally placed to help the strategy achieve several of its key

objectives including the safe, healthy and affordable provision of food to all, not to mention tackling food waste.

This pertinent fact is not lost on Henry: “There are many different things that are going to be part of the solution and frozen is definitely one of them. It is a very effective way of storing nutrients and serving vegetables, which we need to increase in our diet, to a large number of people.

“This idea that somehow everyone’s going to be just eating food that comes from a local plot and animals they’ve raised themselves? That’s not going to happen. That’s part of it, but frozen food will also continue to be a big part of it.”

Despite his belief in the sector and being a fan of frozen himself (“I use a lot of frozen veg, especially spinach - I often add a few handfuls to my dahl”), Henry definitely seems to understand the barriers faced by the industry: “I think there’s a stigma about frozen food which is unfair, because I think some things that are frozen, fish for example, can actually be much higher quality than chilled or ambient products.”

In order to better navigate the role frozen can play in the future of the food industry, Henry plans to visit frozen food manufacturers during the review process - an approach BFFF's Richard Harrow has been pioneering with his ‘member listening’ initiative since he came on board as CEO earlier this year.

The next step for the National Food Strategy is to publish analysis of the current food system before looking at what needs to be done to transform what we have today into something better for the future.

We should all have a clear view of Henry’s recommended direction by the summer of 2020 when his review is published. The government has committed to responding with a white paper six months after that.

In the meantime, his predictions for the future of our food system are positive: “I hope in the years to come the average supermarket basket will contain more vegetables, more wholegrains, more good fats.

“I think innovation, research and data are the most important levers we can pull. I was talking to someone at the University of Nottingham who thinks vegetables will begin to be grown for nutrient density and it will be easy to test such aspects, so people will be able to farm for that,” he continues.

“Those kinds of innovations really excite me – the idea that, without adding a cost, we can really transform what the consumer is eating.”

Quickfire questions

Favourite food to cook: Fish

Guilty frozen food pleasure: Hot Mars Bar sauce on ice-cream

Career highlight: School Food Plan

Career goal: Delivering a strategy that really does bring about positive changes in the food system

Dream dinner party guest: Eartha Kitt